Yang vs. Sanders

[Thewritersunion]

@Revolutionary Think

agreed, hell... it took Trump a DECADE to get into politics 

#slimshady

[TheAvatarState]

@Leo Gura Thank you for going a little more in depth. I don't really disagree with anything you just said, except for Yang's chances severely being long. I do understand where you're coming from.

But you should know better than I do that ideology uses rationality as a smoke screen. Bernie does have the vision... but is it the right one? Is Bernie aware of the 30% of jobs being lost due to automation in the next decade? Is he equipped to handle the problems of the 21st century? Is it possible his policies could be disastrous in the coming changing economic landscape? These are the questions you should be asking yourself. As someone who claims to be looking 20-50-100 years into the future, I'm quite shocked you haven't figured this out yet...

[Leo Gura]

4 hours ago, TheAvatarState said:

Bernie does have the vision... but is it the right one?

Yes it is.

Quote

Is Bernie aware of the 30% of jobs being lost due to automation in the next decade? Is he equipped to handle the problems of the 21st century? Is it possible his policies could be disastrous in the coming changing economic landscape? These are the questions you should be asking yourself. As someone who claims to be looking 20-50-100 years into the future, I'm quite shocked you haven't figured this out yet...

Automation is overblown. That isn't our top problem.

If automation ever becomes a big deal and UBI becomes necessary, we can pass it rather quickly if people want it.

The automation problem can be addressed in ways other than UBI for now.

[XYZ]

Bernie Sanders' position is that a "federal jobs guarantee" is "superior" to UBI because it would put people to work and create a productive society, he believes that the American populace generally does want to work, in the traditional sense, and that University level education should be free and all past student loan debt cancelled. The obvious self-bias being that he himself has worked in government for decades and has been surrounded by employees of the federal government doing their jobs, and so he proposes that anyone in need of work can be put into one of those roles, and expand the government to create enough jobs for anyone who needs/wants them. If the federal minimum wage is raised to $15 as well, as he advocates, even less non-government jobs would exist, and even more people would depend on government work. Another thing left out of this national employment plan would be housing and transportation, as many who lack stable home environments and a means to get places reliably are "too poor to work."

Yang argues that not everyone would be willing to just work for the government, nor that the government can simply make enough work. This point is often followed by re-defining "work" to not just mean having a job or running a business, but to also include the other ways in which people spend their time productively, such as caring for family members, serving their communities directly and passion projects that create human value. He also seems to embrace technological advancements that contribute to higher quality of life in the US, but also mean that less people are needed as traditional employees. He does not think that UBI will incentivise laziness and work-avoidance, since Americans want more than just $1000/month income, and working families would keep working while meeting more of their basic needs. What UBI does is allow people to depend less on private employers or the government for their survival, which results in better working conditions and pay, a more progressive economy than capitalism as usual.

Both visions would have many advantages and disadvantages, helping to correct present known problems, but producing plenty negative consequences along with it. Either way would be very radical and unpredictable, but I would take such a radical plan to address poverty and homelessness in the US. A hybrid of both strategies along with many other nuances would be better than either extreme, and if neither becomes president, Bernie as chairman of the SEC and Yang as head of the treasury would be ideal. Nevertheless, I forsee that Andrew Yang will only become more popular. Campaigning on a thousand dollars a month for every American sounded like a joke at first, but he has made clear by now that could seriously happen, and argued strongly for it, addressed many of my own initial doubts and criticisms. Because that UBI could be the difference between life and death for some, or between uncomfortably poor and comfortably poor for a great many, anyone concerned primarily with their own survival would go for him regardless.

Another strong argument for UBI is that it can be started right away, offering immediate relief. Fixing healthcare, job market, housing market, etc. could take years, or get blocked perpetually by political gridlock.

[TheAvatarState]

9 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

Automation is overblown. That isn't our top problem.

If automation ever becomes a big deal and UBI becomes necessary, we can pass it rather quickly if people want it.

The automation problem can be addressed in ways other than UBI for now.

Uh, the loss of 4 million manufacturing jobs in the swing States, mostly due to automation, is the reason why Donald Trump is our president. You can call it overblown all you want, but that's ideology. You didn't actually do any research to investigate that claim. 

We are already in the middle of it! It's not some Boogeyman out in the distant future. 

"If automation ever becomes a big deal." You know what this position means? It's denying that technology is improving. It's denying it exists. And it's denying it's inevitable. You know this is inevitable. And I want to give you more credit, I want to believe you can see Amazon closing 30% of stores and malls, as well as self-serve kiosks and self-driving trucks already being tested. You're making it hard for me not to gather you're ideological about this issue. 

And you still don't understand UBI. If you think its main purpose is a bandaid for automation, you couldn't be more wrong...

[Anderz]

Here is a new article from 3 hours ago:

"Basic income can’t do enough to help workers displaced by technology

Basic income can end poverty, but it can’t save truckers from being replaced by driverless trucks.

... 

Imagine you’re a truck driver, a Teamsters member. You’re 45, you’ve been driving trucks for a couple decades now, and you’ve gotten your salary up to $70,000 a year. You’re the sole earner in your family; your spouse is a stay-at-home parent for your two kids.

Now imagine that you’re laid off. Your company is firing its drivers and instead buying self-driving trucks from Otto. There aren’t any openings for truck drivers anymore, as the whole industry is switching over. You’re screwed.

Then the federal government swoops in and says, “GOOD NEWS: You and your spouse are each going to get $12,000 basic incomes. So instead of $70,000 a year, you’ll get a whopping $24,000. That’s good, right?”

No. That’s not good. That might provide a decent benefit to fund your subsequent job search, but it doesn’t let you stay out of the workforce and pay your bills. You need something more." - Full article: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/10/18/20919322/basic-income-freedom-dividend-andrew-yang-automation

 

[Scholar]

@Anderz

Quote

It’s too much of a solution for the problem of long-run mass technological unemployment, primarily because that’s a fake problem that hasn’t happened yet and likely never will.

???

[Anderz]

@Scholar Whoa, I missed that part of the article I quoted from. It's true that for example self-driving cars may take much longer to become reality than at first expected. There are many edge cases where the self-driving cars today fail. And also the legal issue, that can take many years to solve. And in general with automation, one expert said that blue collar jobs are often more difficult to replace by robots than AI replacing white collar jobs, because the difficulty with dexterity and physical movement in complex environments.

But yeah, to say that technological unemployment will likely never happen, as the article did, that's definitely false I think. And the technological progress is exponential which even experts often fail to take into consideration. Plus leaps in progress can happen such as when machine learning suddenly became very powerful in recent years, and the next leap I believe is machine learning becoming general (today it's basically only about mindless and narrow learning from huge data sets).

[Revolutionary Think]

5 hours ago, TheAvatarState said:

You're making it hard for me not to gather you're ideological about this issue. 

Right Leo usually digs deep, does research and is usually in tune with certain "things". It's unfortunate that now he seems to want Bernie because he has an emotional investment with him rather than actually looking at hard facts and data. 

[Revolutionary Think]

3 hours ago, Anderz said:

Then the federal government swoops in and says, “GOOD NEWS: You and your spouse are each going to get $12,000 basic incomes. So instead of $70,000 a year, you’ll get a whopping $24,000. That’s good, right?”

No. That’s not good. That might provide a decent benefit to fund your subsequent job search, but it doesn’t let you stay out of the workforce and pay your bills. You need something more." - Full article:

$12,000 > $0 also it helps keep you afloat when you are transitioning. 

[Raptorsin7]

Spend 15 minutes watching Majority Report or The Michaels Brook's Show episodes about andrew yang, and you will have an idea why Leo has a bias against yang. 

[Revolutionary Think]

@Raptorsin7 I know he showed me this in a private message and I rebutted with this 

  

[Raptorsin7]

@Revolutionary Think Yea it's not surprising. Those guys attack anyone they perceive as left of their political views, and pigeon whole their ideological opponents as right wingers no matter where they land on a political spectrum. They have a hard anti Yang bias, and they don't even intimately engage with his ideas. Yang is not a progressive in the same light as Bernie, and he's not going to offer such a seismic shift as Bernie could offer. But to act like Yang is some right wing trojan in the democratic party like Sam and Michael do is nonsense.

I personally think Sam Seder and Michael Brooks are toxic and scummy people, but their political analysis is usually pretty good. But, i definitely think Leo's knee jerk bias against Yang here is because he listens to those programs, and those programs do not actually deal with the substance of what Yang has to offer.

But i am heavily biased because i do not like Sam Seder or Michael Brooks in general, so take what I say about this with a grain of salt.

Edited October 18, 2019 by Raptorsin7

[Revolutionary Think]

@Raptorsin7 Agreed. This is so freaking weird. Looking at Leo for all this time as the most non bias non ideological pragmatic person that does his due diligence and keeps us in check when we are acting like devils and now having to look at him with the same kind of lens he looks at us. Anyway nobody is perfect. I think this is awesome because it shows how not culty this community actually is and how everyone is growing even Leo. 

[Raptorsin7]

@Revolutionary Think I'm pretty sure Leo will be the first to tell you that he is not at the end of his journey. No one's perfect, and especially with respect to political ideologies it's tough to judge others opinions. Everyone has bias and everyone has some ideological leanings. Leo's the man, but don't put him on a pedestal he's trying to self-actualize just like many others on this forum are trying to do as well. He's bound to have opinions and views that are surprising or unsettling to many of us on the forum.

[Revolutionary Think]

1 minute ago, Raptorsin7 said:

He's bound to have opinions and views that are surprising or unsettling to many of us on the forum.

I know I guess that ever since I was at a certain age and all these frustrating things kept happening in my life, I was unhappy, and didn't know who to turn to for help or guidance I thought there was an ultimate answer. With this "ultimate answer" it would put an end to my problems, suffering, pain etc. and Leo looked like the person that I could go to to get the answer. Then with that I'd finally be "free" I just have to come to terms that maybe something like that just doesn't exist. Even before Leo I thought I'd get it from my Judaism but, when I went deeper and deeper into Judaism and how strict it was I just ended up getting more and more depressed. Then I thought it was with enlightenment but, even Leo says practical matters still go on after that. 

[Raptorsin7]

@Revolutionary Think Yea i resonate with that. The meditation stuff is legit imo, if you want genuine answers then meditation practice is a must.

[Beard]

Yang's best position is on decriminalization of all drugs the way Portugal has done, if sanders adopts that and ubi I'd call it heaven

[Leo Gura]

14 hours ago, TheAvatarState said:

"If automation ever becomes a big deal." You know what this position means? It's denying that technology is improving. It's denying it exists.

That has always been the case and always will always be the case.

UBI is not going to automatically solve the technology problem. If robots are doing all the work for mankind, mankind has become redundant and will go extinct.

Of course manufacturing jobs in the US were lost. The world is globalizing. You cannot stop that. Americans need to enter service jobs and creative jobs.

You are the one stuck on this idea of automation, which is an ideology you absorbed from Yang.

So mind your projections.

Automation is one issue out of dozens. It is not the top issue and America should not be governed by what Rust-Belt states personally want.

One person, one vote. Not Rust-Belt runs the show.

[Revolutionary Think]

5 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

UBI is not going to automatically solve the technology problem. If robots are doing all the work for mankind, mankind has become redundant and will go extinct.

So you think that we'll go extinct because technology takes all the jobs away from us. Why can't we just rethink the economy all together and what actual value means? Why not have a world of abundance and work will be obsolete and mankind can be free to create and explore to their hearts content. It can be a renaissance of the likes we've never seen before.